Bay Area

Berkeley's Secret Rooftop Gardens

A field in Tilden? No – the roof of the Freight & Salvage in Downtown Berkeley.

There’s a secret green side to Berkeley, one that is not visible from the sidewalk.

They are Berkeley’s roof gardens – oases of calm amidst a city of concrete. Some were created to provide food, others to make buildings more energy-friendly. Whatever the reason, they remain mostly unseen.

Over the past few weeks, Berkeleyside has located several living roofs around Berkeley. Of course, journalists can't fly, so Berkeleyside likely did not find every rooftop garden. By contacting architects, squinting at Google Maps, and combing through past exposés on green living, staff writers found four living roofs scattered around the city.

The Freight and Salvage, 2020 Addison Street

The Freight and Salvage music venue in Berkeley’s theater district used to be the Stadium Garage until it was renovated and turned into the performing space it is now, said Bob Whitfield, the Freight’s production manager.

The roof garden, which came about when the Freight’s designers decided to seek LEED certification, is a flat, meadowy expanse of native grasses and flowers accessible by ladder. It’s self-sustainable, said Whitfield, so much so that “we forget about it sometimes.” The garden, which was recently replanted, reseeds itself each year and needs a minimal amount of water from the irrigation system built into the roof.

The only hint that the space is not a natural meadow – besides the buildings on all sides – are the two hatches that lead to the building below, one the access point for the ladder and the other a skylight looking onto the stage.

The Ecology Center’s EcoHouse, 1305 Hopkins Street

The EcoHouse at 1305 Hopkins St. was built in 1999 as a demonstration of green building techniques. The EcoHouse became a space for programs of the Ecology Center in 2006, and it is used for workshops and demonstrations of sustainable living techniques. The green roof is not on the house, which has a slanted roof, but on the gardening shed behind the main house.

The shed was built in 2001 by Babak Tondre, the owner of Dig Cooperative, in conjunction with UC Berkeley architecture students, with the idea of a roof garden in mind. The shed was specifically designed to bear heavier weights and has tubing for irrigation built in, said Tondre. In the roof’s first generation, the plants were “mostly edibles,” said Tondre, but when it came time to replant, the caretakers vetoed the idea of more herbs and fruits due to the amount of tending the plants needed.

By its fifth generation, the roof was a succulent garden, as it is today. Berkeley’s mild climate and the hardiness of the plants ensures that gardeners don’t have to clamber up a ladder every week, but someone climbs up at least once a year to pull weeds that determinedly find their way to the roof, said Tondre.

Across the street in the Peralta Community Art Garden, another living shed sprung up after the EcoHouse was built, though this one is one step higher on the green scale. Its architect, John Fordice, constructed a cob shed, made entirely of clay, sand, straw, water and dirt with native grasses springing from its roof.

The Berkeley Animal Shelter, 1 Bolivar Drive

The designers’ first thoughts were to have an animal play area on the roof, said Kate O’Connor, who runs the Berkeley Animal Care Services. Unfortunately, a railing was never installed, so a rooftop dog run would be too dangerous.

The Humane Commission put forward the idea of a living roof in hopes of receiving a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold certification. No one goes up there much, said O’Connor, save gardeners who weed the native flower beds and birds from the nearby Aquatic Park who forage for seeds.

Comal restaurant, 2020 Shattuck Avenue

It was landscaper Beth LaDove who about a year ago proposed to Comal in downtown Berkeley that it consider having a garden on its spacious roof. LaDove had already been growing rare peppers for the Mexican-Californian restaurant, and “wanted to give them more control over the project.” It was the first time she had created a rooftop garden, she said, but “it’s the direction I’m interested in going.”

Aware of the potential weight-bearing limits of the roof, Comal’s co-owner John Paluska and LaDove used Earthboxes as planters, which are extremely lightweight and connect to a bottom-up irrigation system so watering is not a problem.

Roofs also tend to experience severe temperature shifts from night to day, but a dark wall next to the planters acts as a buffer, absorbing heat during the day and radiating it back onto the plants at night.

Some of the vegetables growing on Comal’s roof are difficult to find in the U.S. and, when you can find them, are $30 a pound, said Paluska. These rare chiles – chilacostle and chilhuacle chiles – grow next to towering cherry tomatoes and hoja santa, a plant whose leaves evoke the taste of root beer and are used in cocktails and wraps. “We sort of missed this growing season,” said Paluska, but next year the plan is to expand the garden to cover the whole roof.